As the women’s attorney told the Los Angeles Times: “The problem with the situation is it looked like the police had the goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn’t take the time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don’t look like a large black man.” This could be written off as a sad fluke, except that 25 minutes later different officers opened fire on a different truck — once again getting key details wrong. Can’t officers at least check the license plate, and issue a warning, before opening fire?
“Nobody trains police officers to look for one of their own,” said Maria Haberfeld, a police-training professor at John Jay College in New York, according to the Web site News One. “I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes and I don’t think anybody else would.” We all understand the situation. But saying that we wouldn’t want to be “in their shoes” is no excuse for such dangerous behavior. The police wouldn’t excuse a member of the public for misusing a firearm, regardless of how stressed out that person felt.
News One also published the photograph of a gray Ford truck in the Los Angeles area with a hand-made “Don’t Shoot, Not Dorner, Thank You” poster on the back window. T-shirts and bumper stickers have popped up to similar effect. Those are funny in a dark way, but police ought to recognize how poorly this reflects on them and their strategies. It’s sad when people are more worried about the police than they are about a murderer on the loose.
It’s especially sad when they (or at least many of their leaders) declare that they should have a monopoly on “assault weapons.”
Like most of the law’s most significant effects on economic incentives, this wasn’t actually done on purpose. It’s a function of the same attitude on display in the Times article: a view of economic actors as drones awaiting instructions rather than reasonable people considering their options. And so of course, the solution is to take away options. The Times’s description of the administration’s thinking is priceless:
The Obama administration is investigating the use of stop-loss insurance by employers with healthier employees, and officials said they were considering regulations to discourage small and midsize employers from using such arrangements to circumvent the new health care law. “This practice, if widespread, could worsen the risk pool and increase premiums in the fully insured small group market,” the administration said in a notice in the Federal Register.
How exactly the existence of a design flaw in the law somehow empowers the administration to fix it by “discouraging” self-insurance through regulation is so quaint and naïve a question as to not even merit mention—a vestige of our barbarous past.
Marxism is ever thus. We will build the New Soviet Man.
This sentence encapsulates why this president is such a disaster economically: “The President thinks he can redistribute income without stifling economic growth.”
Among the 4,000 colleges and universities in the federal database, the Creative Center in Omaha, Neb., a for-profit school that offers a three-year bachelor’s in fine arts, had the highest average debt load, at $52,035. Median pay for graduates of the school with five or fewer years’ experience is $31,400, according to PayScale.com.
“Salaries can be pretty darn high or pretty low” for the school’s graduates, who typically get jobs in graphic arts or advertising, said Creative Center President Ray Dotzler.
You don’t say. Of course, if they could figure that out, they’d have probably majored in economics or business. Interestingly, the majors with the best prospects for paying off debt seem to borrow the least, and vice versa.